This is the end, my friend

[KXX4493553 at aol.com]

Now I think it's time to speak about some fundamental things - how I read 
Pynchon in the past und now, and why I'm not satiesfied with the kind of how 
Pynchon is read by some members of the list. It's not a question of divergent 
political views or how P. can be used for critisizing Nixon, Bush jun. or 
whoever. I think P. is a writer for the context of the cold war, and nowadays 
these contexts are irreversibly destroyed.
I'm a Marxist, yes (whatever this means in these days), and I don't believe 
in the religion of the "free market" - it's a religion, yes, and the Chicago 
Boys are its priests. But  this is not so important for what I have to say.

But let's begin with the begin: I read P. first, as a translation of GR was 
published in 1981. I was a young student at the Frankfurt University, 22 
years old, read Adorno and the Cricitical Theory ("Dialectics of 
Enlightenment", "Aesthetical theory" and so forth), Deleuze/Guattari with 
their "machines of desire", "cut-up"-texts (Burroughs) a. s. o. In these days 
there was a kind of youth revolt in Germany, a "no future"-mentality and 
street fights concerning the Frankfurt Airport ("Startbahn 18 West"). I heard 
Habermas at the university (Paul Feyerabend wanted to get Habermas' job, but 
the university didn't want him), Ivan Illich, Pierre Bourdieu, Searle, 
Derrida. I saw "Permanent vacation" and "Apocalypse Now" in the cinema, there 
were student circles where they read GR and "Das Kapital", with the smell of 
dope and pot in the air. We heard punk and New Wave and the "Neue Deutsche 
Welle", "Kristallnacht" by the German BAP, and so on and so on. We had 
depressions, street fights and unlucky love affairs. We wanted to kill 
ourselves. A little later, there was the peace movement and "petting instead 
of pershing". Jacques Derrida was arrested at the airport of Prague with a 
suitcase full of drugs ( an affair arranged by the Czech secret service, as I 
heard later). With one word: we created our own world, very apocalyptic, more 
dope than hope, full of very un-PC thoughts, and P. represented all of that: 
the hero of the subculture in its last convulsions. A few years later, since 
84, I think, the same people became yuppies and only wanted to earn a lot of 
money and became brokers, managers and lawyers. Qué sera, sera - as Doris Day 
sang.

Pynchon created for me a new epistemology, GR was for me a psychodelic thing, 
" Strawberry fields" in literature. Western civilization was a cipher for 
"entropy", and entropy was official politics, overkill and "Nachruestung". In 
1983 Sloterdijk published his "Criticism of Cynical Reason", the 
"one-dimensional man" of the 80's in Germany. The theory of the "reflexive 
wrong consciousness" (as Sloterdijk called it) was the counterpart of GR on 
the philosophical field for me. 
What we didn't know in these days: "counterculture" came to its end (see 
above), Reaganomics was still something very strange for European ears (with 
the exception of the "iron lady" in England), and  that the so called 
postmodernism (in these days in the shape of poststructuralism) became later 
the ideological forerunner of neoliberalism. Originally, postmodernism was in 
deed for me "anarchist epistemology", anything goes in the best sense, but 
not a libertarian tricky thing or the "invisible hand" of a whatever 
neoclassical theory of economics. 
And so: counterculture had nothing to do with 9/11, with globalization, with 
the clash of civilizations, with the "end of history". We wanted to make our 
own history, but in the sense of revolt and solidarity, and the ego-shooters 
of today would have been symptoms of decadence and (capitalist) greed for us. 
We KNEW the ambivalence of all our dreams, but nowadays all these dreams are 
dreamt out. We were not the sixties people, we were more sceptical and more 
apocalyptic and more "deterritorialized" and we made jokes about the "APO 
grandpas" and these funny and ridiculous hippies, but we were still 
counterculture.
This is for me Pynchon in my memory. These days are over and gone. The rest 
is - the list.

Kurt-Werner Poertner.
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